Danger! Never assume your MSP's clients are loyal

Episode 314 November 18, 2025 00:25:47
Danger! Never assume your MSP's clients are loyal
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Danger! Never assume your MSP's clients are loyal

Nov 18 2025 | 00:25:47

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Hosted By

Paul Green

Show Notes

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 314 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Danger! Never assume your MSP’s clients are loyal

As an MSP, have you been lulled into a false sense of security? It’s hard for you to win a client, but when they do join you, they stay with you for years, right? But what if that retention was not because they’re in love with your service, but because it’s such a mind blowing event for them to think about switching to another MSP, so it just feels easier to stay with you.

If this hasn’t happened to you yet, are you confident that right now a client isn’t secretly looking into leaving? Here’s a simple solution to proactively work on your retention without having to do tons of extra work, and you might even generate some extra revenue along the way.

Most MSPs I meet are rightly proud of how long their clients stay with them. You’ll hear them say things like, Oh yeah, we’ve still got our first ever client from 10 years ago, or, Our retention rate is 98%. And on the surface that’s brilliant, but here’s the uncomfortable truth… a lot of that so-called loyalty isn’t really loyalty at all. It’s just inertia. Your clients aren’t staying because they’re wildly in love with your service, they’re staying because it feels too hard to leave. Think about it, moving to a new MSP is a massive hassle. It’s complicated, it’s risky, and they don’t really understand all of the tech side of it anyway. So even if they’re not a hundred percent happy, it’s easier to just stick with what they’ve got. That’s called inertia loyalty. And the danger is it gives MSPs a false sense of security.

You might think you’re doing a great job keeping clients happy, but the moment one of those loyal clients gets a real reason to look around, they will.

Maybe a competitor reaches out at just the right time. Maybe there’s a big mistake or your main contact leaves. Suddenly that inertia disappears and the client that would never leave is gone. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, I promise it will at some point. It’s horrible. None of us wants to think about it, but it’s also a wake up call. And the way I see it, we can prevent it. So what’s the answer? Well, you can’t just hope that loyalty lasts, you’ve got to work at it. You’ve got to turn those stuck clients into bonded clients, the kind who stay because they genuinely want to. And the good news is this doesn’t take huge gestures. It’s about doing small things regularly that make your clients feel valued, connected and confident that you are on their side.

Here are a few ways to get you started…

Number one: Schedule regular non-tech calls. So not ticket reviews, not project updates, just a short friendly catch up every quarter. Ask them how their business is doing, what’s changed, what they’re focusing on, and just show that you care about them as people and not just devices. I mean, really this is basic account management and you don’t need a separate account manager to do it. You could make one call a week to a different client and achieve this exact effect. Interestingly, some of these calls will act as mini QBRs (quarterly business reviews), although I prefer to call them strategic reviews because quarterly is overkill. And what I mean by that is that when you’re chatting to your clients about their business and their future, some of them will give you opportunities to sell them something else. And when I say sell, I don’t really mean pushing something they don’t really want or need. I mean, giving them an answer to a problem that they already have. There are many more things that your clients would buy from your MSP if only you had more conversations with them and discovered what those opportunities were.

Number two: Share micro wins. When your team prevents downtime or spots a phishing attempt or saves a client from an outage, tell all of your clients. Don’t assume they know how much value you deliver. A quick email saying, Oh, we caught this before it became an issue. And maybe even if you sorted that out for another client and therefore you could stop it being an issue for this client, that would just help to reinforce why they keep paying you.

Number three: Celebrate milestones. Client anniversaries, staff birthdays, major business wins. Take a note of them and send a little message or a card or something like that. It’s simple, it’s human, and it helps you to stand out.

Number four: Ask for feedback and then act on it. Not just surveys, but actual conversations. Hey, how are we doing? Is there anything we could do to make life easier for you? And then follow up when you do something about it because clients really do remember that.

Number five: Keep showing them the future. Don’t let your relationship be about keeping things running. Be that MSP that nudges them forward. Show them new ideas, new tools and new efficiencies. Clients bond with the MSP that helps them progress. So if you do these things regularly, not as one-offs, but as habits, as a system that’s baked into the business, then you’ll build relationships that go way beyond inertia. Because real loyalty isn’t built on contracts or complexity, it’s built on connection, trust, and the feeling that their MSP is always looking out for them.

The reason your MSP’s marketing is so hard

Generating leads and winning new clients for your MSP has nothing to do with coming up with creative marketing ideas. It’s actually much simpler than that. To have better marketing and win new clients, you need one magic ingredient. Let me tell you what that ingredient is and how to bake it into the very core of your MSP.

I’ve been back in the Wild West for a few months now. What’s the wild West? I mean the MSP sub Reddit, I do find it a mostly negative place where great questions are hijacked by angry people, hiding behind anonymity. They very quickly and frankly quite readily fire machine guns at other people just because they have differing opinions. Anyway, I digress. But recently I set up a new alerting system to tell me when anyone talks about MSP marketing on Reddit, and it’s been pinging away two or three times a week.

So I’ve had a good look through months and months of threats for the first time in years. And it struck me once again, just how many MSPs struggle with their marketing. In fact, they struggle not just with knowing what to do, but also they struggle with implementing it. And yet implementation is the secret sauce. It’s the magic ingredient.

I know lots of very smart business owners who don’t achieve anywhere near what they’re capable of because they can’t consistently implement well.

And the opposite is also true. I know of lots of average business owners who are doing very well because they are excellent implementers. And this principle applies not just to your marketing, but to all aspects of your business. I’d rather be a less naturally smart but good at implementing kind of guy than the other way round. In fact, maybe I already am. Now, luckily, implementation is not a fixed natural talent that you are born with. It’s something you develop, you improve, and you grow. And if you are struggling to implement great marketing, please let me help you.

Now that it’s November, most of 2025 has gone. So let me ask you a question. What progress have you made on implementing your marketing so far this year? If the answer is *hangs head in shame and admits*, actually, Paul, nowhere near as much as I’d hoped, then there are two ways that I can help you.

First, let me give you an out and out plug. With my MSP Marketing Edge membership for our 700 plus members around the world, we give them a system for their marketing, we break that system down into easy to follow tasks and we give them all of the marketing content that they need. And for those who struggle to get it done, we have a done for you team so they can get their marketing done for them. So you can see if that’s available in your area or not because we only work with one MSP per area. Go to mspmarketingedge.com. And the idea behind that is if your marketing is implemented by other people – and my team, that’s all they do, they implement MSPs marketing for them – you can see that that’s a powerful way to get it implemented. You essentially just outsource it to someone that you trust. Now, the other way I can help you right now is by giving you three easy ways to make implementation less of a headache in your business.

Easy way number one: Build marketing into your routine. So think of it like going to the gym. If you wait until you feel like it, it’s never going to happen, but if it’s on the calendar, let’s say every weekday at 9am or whatever works for you, then it becomes a habit. Book 90 minutes and protect 90 minutes every working day to work on your marketing. Close your PSA, mute Teams. Treat it like a client project, because it is in fact, it’s the most important client project you’ve got. It’s your own business and working on implementing stuff within your own business.

Easy idea number two: Don’t do it all yourself. You are great at running an MSP, but not necessarily writing blog posts or creating social media graphics. So just get help. You can outsource marketing to experts or delegate parts of it internally. Maybe someone on your team enjoys writing or social media, so give them ownership of it. And if you’re using something like the MSP Marketing Edge, most of the hard work’s already done for you, your job is simply to make sure it’s actually implemented.

Easy idea number three: Keep score, because what gets measured gets done. If you’re serious about consistency, track it. Use a simple spreadsheet or dashboard, list your key marketing actions and tick them off weekly. Sent your weekly email? Tick. Posted a daily post on LinkedIn? Tick. Asked a client for a Google review? Tick. You’ll be amazed how motivating it becomes when you can see visible progress even from small consistent actions.

So that’s it. Make it routine, get help and keep score. And remember, marketing success doesn’t come from doing big one-off marketing campaigns because you just end up doing tiny amounts of activity across the year. Instead, it comes from doing dozens of small actions, doing them consistently and doing them day after day, week after week. The MSPs who win at marketing aren’t necessarily the best marketers. They’re the ones who implement the most.

Does your MSP spend this much acquiring a new client?

Featured guest: Nate Freedman runs two brands built for one purpose: helping MSPs grow. Tech Pro Marketing is the agency side: done-for-you lead generation. MSP Sites is the platform: websites and tools built from the same playbook he’s used for years.

His focus is simple: take what actually works to get MSPs leads, strip out the fluff, and make it easy for IT business owners to put into action.

Do you know exactly how much it costs to acquire a new customer for your MSP? If you do, you are definitely ahead of the pack because most MSPs don’t have a clue. There’s another side to this, which is what’s the average lifetime value of that new customer to your business? My special guest today is a true marketing expert and someone I’m delighted to call a friend, and he’s very, very good at focusing the MSPs that he works with on these two figures, and therefore how it affects their marketing. He’s also in the last year started being advised directly by Alex Hormozi, and you are going to love some of the big risks and the changes he’s made to his business since then.

Hi, I am Nate Freedman from Tech Pro Marketing and MSP Sites. I help MSPs win new clients and it’s been my mission for the last eight years to do so.

And thank you so much for joining me back on the show, Nate. It’s been too long. And actually you and I were together a couple of months ago at ScaleCon25 in New Orleans. We were the naughty table at the back. So Nate found himself a table off to the left, there were about 400 MSPs at this amazing show, and Nate got the table at the back off to the left where no one could really hear us and we were just whispering little ideas to each other and occasionally you heckled some of the speakers on the stage, which was pretty cool. But it was amazing to hang out with you and I said to you, you’ve got to come back on the podcast. There’s so many things I want to talk to you about today, before we jump in and we start talking about them. And particularly we’re going to talk about ROI and we’re going to talk about your experience with Alex Hormozi, which is a very cool story. But before we start talking about those, for those people who haven’t heard of you yet, just tell us who are you Nate Freedman.

You haven’t listened to Paul’s entire back catalog because I think it has been about maybe five years.

Six years.

Yeah, so for me, I started a lot of MSPs where I was interested in computers in high school. Me and you, Paul, have a similar story where, interested in computers, got more interested in web and online marketing, that’s kind of where I developed my interest. So for me, long story short, I went on a website called Upwork about 10 years ago thinking about leaving my corporate career. And I got a gig doing a website and SEO for a hypnotist in Australia. Not going to go too deep into the world of quit smoking hypnosis, but every time that she got a new appointment, she made $500 and she loved the SEO work that I was doing because it was driving real revenue. Long story short, worked with a bunch of different niches, kind of similar to you. Eventually found my way back to the computer support world and then shifted my agency’s focus to only helping IT support companies, specifically MSPs mostly who serve their local market, generate leads and win new customers.

It’s been a journey over the past eight years. I think when I started, like a lot of people I underestimated the challenge, thought it was going to be as easy as that quit smoking hypnotist deal. But what I realised it was a lot harder, but also where I thought that $500 for every session she got, I thought she was the richest person alive. I realised that MSPs have so much more potential and that they can actually, with one deal generate millions of dollars in new revenue. And I don’t think that’s a stretch for a lot of the audience listening today. So I think it’s a good segway into our topic of customer acquisition cost and lifetime value.

Exactly that. And that’s one of the things that has always appealed to me when I’ve looked at, because obviously you and I are kind of slightly in competition with each other because you do marketing for MSPs and so do I, but we come at it from different angles. And what I’ve always loved about your approach and why I’m delighted to partner with Tech Pro Marketing, we send people to you, we send people to MSP Sites because you do lots of things we don’t do. And what I’ve always loved about your approach is it’s always been about ROI, that return on investment, and you and I know there’s like a thousand people that do marketing out there in the MSP world, and you are one of the few people who always brings every conversation back to ROI. So here we are as we’re standing right at the end of 2025 now, and we’re sort of just on that verge of 2026, the conversations that you are having with MSPs, are a lot of MSPs still coming into it and just saying to you, Hey, I just need a website, or I just need this, or I just need leads, or are more of them starting to have that conversation of how do we turn this from being a spend into an investment?

And I think it’s about this concept of meet your customers where they’re at. And we do, my brand MSP Sites is specifically about MSP websites. And that’s because I think on the surface level, a lot of MSPs, just businesses in general, in their mind, deep in their heart, they’re saying, well, I need to win new customers. But then that comes out of their mouth and they’re saying, I need a new website. And I think it’s just the zeitgeist out there. People just believe a new website is going to lead to new customers. The truth is, it’s not. There’s certain ways you can use your website and you can leverage it to get new customers, but a new website on its own is not going to do that. So I definitely start by meeting our clients where they’re at and say, okay, well, you need a new website. Let’s talk about that. A few questions in, I peel back a couple layers, it’s always about getting new clients.

I wrote an article eight years ago, I think one of my first articles that I wrote on Barracuda Smarter MSP blog was about selling on value, not based on the services. And I can honestly tell you, even though I wrote that article eight years ago, it’s taken me eight years to even get to the point of really understanding that and really facing this return on investment discussion with the clients directly. As a marketing company it’s scary and challenging as an IT company, I know there are some IT companies doing it as well. It’s less scary but more challenging. So yeah, at the end of the day, I think there are three core niches in all of marketing and in all of business it’s health, wealth, and relationships. And if you’re in the IT business or you’re in the marketing business or in the lead gen business, you’re in the wealth business and anyone who’s working with us, they’re doing it to see a return on investment.

And it’s interesting, you and I were just talking before we started the interview about some of the MSPs that you’re working with right now and some of the things they’re doing, and we won’t name names, but you just showed me one of your clients who’s generating more than one lead per day. And by lead we mean a qualified lead. So someone that has reached out to them and said, please, can you talk to us? We need some help. And we are recording this in the middle of October. And you were saying they’ve generated more leads and there’ve been business days in October so far, which is so cool. And then we started to look into some of the things they’re doing, and obviously they’re following all of your advice, their website’s up to date, they’ve got lots of content, they’re dominating YouTube in their local area. There’s lots of things they’re doing. Do you still see a disconnect between MSPs that expect to start spending a few dollars on marketing on Monday, and then they’re like, they’re upset because they haven’t got any leads by Wednesday versus the example we were just given there? Is that still a big thing? And does that mean you and I and all the other marketers in the channel have still got a hell of a lot of work to do in terms of educating MSPs?

This MSP really understood the value of a new client for them, and then they understood how much they can spend and how much they can invest to get that new client.

So this example that we saw, I think they’ve done an analysis that basically for all of the new managed services clients, they get the average agreement is around $2,500 per month. And then they found that their service margin, and these guys are very into the evolve peer groups and the ConnectWise and the service leadership reports, they want to be best in class. Their service margin is somewhere around 50%, probably their margin’s a little better, like 52-53%. So on average, they’re profiting $1,250 every single month for every new client. And they keep their clients, most of our MSPs for at least five years, usually 10 years. Many of their clients have been with them for 20 years already. So the average lifetime value in profit I’m talking about for this particular account is somewhere around $150,000. Their close rate on leads is somewhere around 40%. So you can see from that first part of the month where they got 10 leads, they might win four clients out of it. Not a math genius, but I think that’s around $600,000 in profit. So Paul, if I asked you, Hey, I’m going to give you $600,000 in profit, how much would you give me back? What would you want to give me back for that?

Let’s see. But when you put it into a question like that, it becomes so obvious. So here’s my follow up question then. Why isn’t every MSP doing this, Nate?

I think one is cashflow, realistic cashflow issues where it’s like this client has cash, they understand cash, they understand the power of it. So they’ve actually gotten investment to float their way through so they can put in this higher spend each month because to get that 600,000, I think you would pay a lot, but it would never make sense cashflow wise to pay 500,000 upfront for 600,000 in lifetime value. That just wouldn’t make sense. So you do need a significant amount of cash upfront to have a decent marketing budget. And then it’s probably just mindset after that that they’ve got the stomach for it. I think the issue that I’ve seen, maybe you’ve seen, and I’ve had myself as well, so I’ve seen it, but I’ve also felt it and I’ve done it, is I’ve been like, Hey, I want to add a million dollars in annual revenue this year and my marketing budget is $3,000 a month.

Exactly. And how do you match those two things up, which is always a thing. Nate, I can talk about this for hours, but I want to just change the subject just for the last part of the interview, because when you and I were in New Orleans a few months ago, you told me that you had recently engaged with Alex Hormozi. So many people listening to this podcast or watching this on YouTube, will have heard of Alex Hormozi. Some people may not have done. Do you want to just tell us who Alex is and what you’ve started to do with him? Because as someone who is a distant admirer of Alex’s and reads everything that he puts out, watches, everything he puts out, I thought this was so cool what you’re doing.

I’ve engaged him as my advisor. It was definitely the most expensive thing I’ve ever done in my life. But for me, if you follow him, his journey, I think one thing that’s very cool about $100M Offers and then building acquisition.com is everything that he’s achieved in life, he is kind of proved along the way. So he takes a lot of big risks as he’s going. So one of the risks that he took is, if you read the first book, $100M Offers, is he sold off all of his gyms to start this company Gym launch. And actually he took a $1million loss when he sold the gyms because he wanted to be able to use that six month period of time that it would’ve take to prepare the gyms for sale to go and actually sell his new product, which was Gym Launch.

So for me, kind of putting the investment in with him, and I think in my opinion, I think probably your opinion, it’s the best advising money can buy. You know what I mean? I’m sure I can’t get Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, and I know one of them is not even alive anymore, but the other one, I am sure I could offer a million dollars. He’s not going to advise me. Do you know what I mean? This is somebody that is open for advising and he is available. So I think what I’ve learned from him, number one is taking risks in business, taking calculated risks, I was way too passive beforehand. And for me, the risks that I’m talking about right now is investing in education and investing an extreme amount in an advisor. So I didn’t take enough risks in investing in education.

Number two, hard work. One thing I learned there when I went out to visit their office is I asked about his sales team. I was like, how’s your sales team so good? How are they selling so much? He’s like, well, they get here at 5:00 AM and they leave at 6:00 PM I was like, what? And he’s like, yeah, and they work half day Saturdays as well. And I was like, that makes sense, because my question was how do you have time to do all the sales practice and the role plays that it takes to get good at sales and make all the calls, and they put an extreme amount of work. So the value of hard work, the value of wanting to win and enjoying your business. And it’s like, dude, well, you’re like a slave driver there. It’s like, no, everyone here loves hard work and everyone here, they move across the country to take this job where you’re going to work five and a half, 12-13 hour days every single week because you love what you’re doing. So I learned that there are people out there that want to work hard and love working hard, and I just need to find them.

I think a lot of MSP owners and small business owners, we have this kind of guilt where it’s like, I need to give my employees tons of time off. I need to make their life as cushy as possible. And I think the guilt is coming from the fact that we’re earning all the money at the end of the day. So we try to give them these really nice, we try to reward them with these other things because we’re not going to reward them financially. I learned that it’s like, no, I want my people on my team. I want them to work extremely hard and I want them to get an offer for $500,000 a year annual salary, and if I can afford it, I’ll match it. And if I can’t, they’ve done an amazing job for me for a few years and then they’ve set the culture. And think the last thing is just the leverage and just using leverage in your business. So we talked about YouTube earlier, and MSPs should be doing that. Alex, if you guys have been following, some of you guys have, some of you guys are going to go look him up and be like, whoa, what did I just stumble into? This guy used his personal brand to build so much leverage. So me and when I went out there for a day with these seven other business owners spent a fortune to get there, and Alex is really cleaning up. His minute rate is what most people make in their career. This guy earns so much, it’s such insane amount. He’s done that all through leverage.

He’s done that by creating the number one personal brand in the business space on Instagram, on YouTube, number one selling author, number one on Amazon, number one everywhere, given away all of this information. But the whole crazy thing about it is because he works so hard, because he’s so good at what he does, though he’s given away more information than anyone else out there, he’s actually only given away a fraction of the information that he really has. And he leaves the rest for leverage, and then he delivers on every promise. So when I was talking to their sales team beforehand, I was a little bit nervous, I’ve obviously never spent this much on education. I’ve joined programs that are $2,000 a month, $3,000 a month. This is in another league. And they’re like, well, has Alex delivered on every other promise? Promises in his books on the webinars and everything you’ve been to has everything delivered on it. Yeah, they have. So do you think this would be different? No, I don’t. And the truth is it wasn’t. And now I’m going back for another year. So is that the answer?

It is. And I have to say, and I think I said this to you a few months ago, the quality of the conversation that you and I had in 2025 was different to the conversation we had in 2024. And a lot of that I think was things that he had said to you and ideas that he’d put in your head and directions he’d taken you. And certainly, I’m watching what you’re doing with your business now, and it’s really cool, and you are doing things that I don’t think you even knew existed just 12 months before. So it absolutely shows the power of paying for really good advice.

And the irony of it is, his first book that kind of blew up was called a $100M Offers, How to Create an Offer So Good that People Feel Stupid Saying No. I read the book. This is in 2020 when it first came out, I read it, then I read it again, then I read it a third time, then I listened to the audio book, then I watched and listened to all his podcasts, I watched all his YouTube. I’ve heard it so many times over and over, but it took me really getting some skin in the game. And this is where I’m saying taking risks is so important to being an entrepreneur, because once you have skin in the game, then you really do it. And for him, he knew, I mean, if you’re an MSP trying to raise prices, just think about it this way, if he had charged me a hundredth of what he charged to go out there, I would probably be like, eh, the information wasn’t that good, I’m not going to implement it. But because as humans, we equate quality to price, and especially when it comes to the sunk costs we put into something or the investment we put into, you’re going to get something out of it. It’s like you go to Ariana Grande or whatever, the ticket’s like a thousand dollars, they sold out the first day, I’m telling my kids, we are going to have the best night ever, this is going to be the best concert, you’ll have the best night of your life. We’ll make sure we do. But we go to whatever, some other concerts, it’s only 50 bucks, whatever. We’ll leave early. We won’t have that much fun.

Yeah, absolutely. There’s definitely some lessons there, and pricing is, let’s be honest, is a quarter of a percent of the stuff that Alex Hormozi talks about. But yes, Alex Hormozi’s books, $100M Offers, $100M Leads, and then the new $100M Money Models, which I’m just halfway through at the moment. They’re insane books. Get them all, as Nate says, get the books, read them 15 times, listen to the books, and you won’t regret it. If you even do what Nate didn’t, which is you actually start implementing off the books, and I think everything you need is there in the books. But as you say, it’s implementation. This has been a fantastic talk. Thank you so much. Let’s just finish very briefly, tell us what do you do to help MSPs? So tell us about Tech Pro Marketing. Tell us about MSP sites. Oh, and how can we get in touch with you?

Great, thank you. So you can find me, our website’s the first thing, techpromarketing.com, mspsites.com. You can find me on Instagram, my handle is Nate helps MSPs. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You can look me up, but it’s linkedin.com/in/nateFreedman, one word. With MSP Sites we have a platform and a system to help you get new clients. It’s a complete end-to-end system. It includes a full website, which we set up and build for you, and then a lead capture and lead generation system behind it. We integrate with MSP Marketing Edge with a few other partners to help with some of the awareness and brand building and relationship building elements of it. And then we also have a coaching and training program to help you guys with the SEO and the ads and the lead generation elements of it. With Tech Pro marketing, we actually do all that stuff for you. So a lot of our clients, they’ll come in and they’ll sign up with a package on MSP Sites, which gives you the full system and teaches you how to use it, but then they might upgrade and just go for our done for services where we build the whole system and then we run it for you. And our website is mspsites.com. If you go there, you’ll be able to schedule a call with our team and we will help you figure out what the right package is for you.

The Marketing Minute

Hi, this is Ben Spector of BS Consulting. Here’s a quick fix you can make in your CRM today. Segment your mailing list properly. A lot of MSPs send exactly the same newsletter to everyone – prospects, clients, ex clients, even suppliers – and wonder why engagement’s low. First up, you can start with the lifecycle stage. Send lead nurture content to prospects, upsell or renewal reminders to clients and re-engagement campaigns to past clients. And then think about layering in personas. Are they a business owner who cares about risk and cost or maybe an IT manager who wants technical detail? And lastly, you could segment by industry – schools, accountants, law firms – they all need different messaging. If you’re using something like HubSpot, use active lists to manage this automatically based on contact properties and deal data. If you target your messaging, it makes you look more relevant and it will get you more replies.

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:02] Speaker A: No deep pockets, no problem for owners of growing MSPs. The podcast with smart ideas, a clear plan, and so much more. [00:00:13] Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the last regular show of 2025. Starting next week, I've got a series of Christmas and New Year specials for you. I'm going to tell you more about those at the end of the show. So for now, here's what I've got coming up for you today. How to set up an AI assisted sales funnel. You can't sell a client strategic advice if they see you under a desk plugging in cables. And my special guest is going to tell you the mistakes you'll make hiring your first salesperson. Welcome to episode 317 powered by MSP. [00:00:44] Speaker A: Marketingedge.Com Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast the. [00:00:49] Speaker B: Way that prospects are searching for a new MSP is changing dramatically. The old way, where people just went onto Google and did their own research, is increasingly being replaced by the new way where someone gets AI to do the research phase for them and then just validates the suggestions made. That means you need to understand what the AI insisted buyer journey is and make sure your MSP has all the correct marketing resources in place. You know how for years we've all been obsessed with SEO, Search engine optimization, you know, getting your keywords right, building backlinks and just ranking higher on Google? That's been the game for years. Well, the game's changing again and if you're not watching what's happening with AI discovery, you could slowly find your MSP disappearing from view. Let me explain. So I was recently reading a pretty cool newsletter and it was about a company called, I think it's pronounced Decibo. They're not in our world. They sell something called a learning management system. [00:01:48] Speaker C: Goodness knows what that is, but they've. [00:01:50] Speaker B: Been quietly killing it. Frankly, in a new world of what's got many different names but seems to be being called Answer Engine Optimization or aeo. You may have heard me refer to. [00:02:01] Speaker C: It before in videos or on the. [00:02:02] Speaker B: Podcast as Geo, but let's call it AEO Answer Engine Optimization from here on forward. In simple terms, this is all about being discovered inside AI tools like Chat. [00:02:14] Speaker C: GPT, Copilot, Gemini, or Perplexity, because that's. [00:02:17] Speaker B: Where many people now are now going. [00:02:19] Speaker C: To do their research. [00:02:21] Speaker B: So instead of just going onto Google and typing what's the best MSP for me or IT support near me, they're asking ChatGPT, you know, what's the best. [00:02:29] Speaker C: IT support for a 20 person business? [00:02:32] Speaker B: That's A legal practice or something like that. To use the example I was reading in the newsletter, they're going on to ChatGPT and saying what's the best LMS learning management system for a 500 person. [00:02:43] Speaker C: Company with a remote workforce? [00:02:45] Speaker B: And if you're not one of the companies that the AI mentions, then you don't even get a chance. So that company I was telling you about, decibo, they noticed this some time ago and they decided to go all in on giving AI the resources it needs to make sure they come up in that AI research. And now nearly 13% of their high intent leads. So that's a bit of a marketing. [00:03:07] Speaker C: Term for people who actually go on to book demos. [00:03:09] Speaker B: So for you, a high intent lead will be someone who books a 15 minute call into your calendar. For that company, 13% of their high intent leads are now coming from AI Discovery. That's gone up 400% in a year. And they're all doing this because they're, they're a big business, but it's all being powered by one person in their. [00:03:29] Speaker C: Marketing team using the right strategy and a bit of clever AI automation. [00:03:34] Speaker B: And here's what I really found fascinating from reading this newsletter. They realized that the real battle here is no longer about generic keywords or anything like that, it's actually about brand. So when people are using AI tools, they'll get a recommendation and then they'll take the brand and they'll go onto Google and search for the brand name directly. So this company, decibo, they shifted their focus from trying to rank on Google for best lms, which is their keyword, to making sure that more people actually knew their name to see both, which is a big mindset shift in your marketing. And if you've had an SEO driven strategy, you might need a similar big mindset shift because it means that the most important metric isn't how high are we on Google, it's how many people are searching for our own brand. In other words, your reputation becomes your SEO. So you run an MSP and you might be thinking, well Paul, this is fascinating but we're not playing at decibels level. And of course you're right. But this shift does affect you too because over the next couple of years, as we go into 2026 and then 2027, your prospects are going to stop googling it support this town or near me and instead they are going to ask their preferred AI tool, which IT companies in my area have great customer service and specialize in cybersecurity and if those AI tools don't know about you, if they can't find enough trustworthy, well, well structured, up to date content about your business, then you'll vanish from the shortlist before it's even written. And that's why now is the time to start building your discoverability. So I've got for you three things. [00:05:10] Speaker C: That you can do. [00:05:10] Speaker B: Number one, keep your website content fresh, structured and factual. So AI tools, they love data tables, they love clear headings in blogs, and they love real case studies. Make sure you've got plenty of that on your website. Number two, make sure your brand name is mentioned in lots of the right contexts, so obviously on your website. But also if you can get other articles written about you elsewhere, obviously if you can get mentions on review platforms where they actually put the business name in, that would be fantastic. If you can get your customers to do that. And you might even try and build up mentions of your MSP in forums. [00:05:47] Speaker C: Like Reddit or Quora. [00:05:49] Speaker B: Not because the humans are going to. [00:05:50] Speaker C: Go there to look for you, but. [00:05:51] Speaker B: Because it's going to help with your AI discoverability. And then number three, to focus your SEO more on who you are and what problems you solve, rather than chasing random keywords that don't convert. So yes, SEO is still going to be a thing going forward, but I think this is quite exciting because it's hard if you're one of 50 or 60 MSPs in a town and someone else is already dominating traditional SEO for keywords. This is great because now you're focusing your SEO on making sure that more people know about your msp. And this company, decibos Research and Success, in fact shows what's possible. They're now generating pipeline and leads and clients from AI searches and they're doing it right now. And they've done it not by gaming the system, but by creating genuinely useful, high trust content that I can easily understand and find and surface and parse and turn into research for people. So here's my opinion. Just as we all have to learn SEO as part of our marketing, it's something we've all had to do over the last couple of decades. Now we'll all need to learn A E O over the next few years and this really is the start of the next big shift in online visibility. And if your MSP isn't being mentioned by the machines, it might as well not exist. [00:07:06] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to come. [00:07:10] Speaker B: Tell me who does the selling in your msp. If it's still you, but you'd love to hire a salesperson to do it for you, Then you are going to love hearing from my special guest today. He's going to tell you all the mistakes that MSPs make when they hire their first salesperson. And he is a real expert in this field. He's going to be here to talk about this in the next few minutes. There's something that all MSPs do because it quickly solves a problem for a client, but it's a disaster if your client watches you do it. It can completely change their relationship with you and actually make it a thousand times harder for you to sell them more strategic services in the future. So what is this thing? You're going to laugh when I tell you because it's something so simple, yet it is so dangerous. And I promise you that by eradicating it, you're going to make more profit from your exist existing clients. I subscribe to hundreds of different email newsletters anywhere I can see value in learning from someone while I'm happy to be on their list. And I dedicate just a little bit of time each day to reading email newsletters that top up my brain. Now, recently I got an email from a guy who actually writes good advice about productivity for high achievers. But I did a massive double take when I saw this in his email. So let me read it to you. It said, hey Paul, you've probably heard the hype. Wake up at 4am and you'll dominate the day, crush your goals and unlock next level productivity, right? Well let me tell you what actually matters. This is what he's writing in his email. He says, I've been waking up at 5am since 2013 and recently shifted to 4am when I started driving for Uber in March of this year. And here's the truth. It's not about the clock, it's about what you do with the time once you're up. So that's the end of his email. Now that's actually really good advice. But just listen to this line once more. I recently shifted to 4am when I started driving for Uber in March of this year. So please don't think that I'm criticizing this guy. And I'm certainly not criticizing driving for Uber. That's not my intention at all. You do what you need to do to survive, right? But this guy, in all of his marketing on his website, he's positioning himself as someone who offers productivity consulting for high achievers. And high achievers do not value advice. And from someone who gets up at 4 in the morning to drive an Uber. This is a massive disconnect between audience and message, and it's no different for MSPs who visit a client site and get their knees dirty plugging in cables under desks or they answer the help desk phone for a password reset. Again, this is not a criticism, it's just an observation. If a client sees you on the floor plugging in cables or talks to you regularly for low level tasks, frankly, they're very unlikely to ever hire you for strategic technology advice. You and I know that you can do both levels to a very high standard, but the clients don't. You'll make more money and keep clients longer by positioning yourself at a strategic level than you will by being positioned as doing work that anyone can do. So here's a question for you. If you don't have the resources to hire someone else to do this work for you right now, what can you do to hide the fact that you still do it yourself? [00:10:22] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to. [00:10:25] Speaker B: Come wouldn't it be great if there was one small thing that you could implement on your service desk which would a tell you when you've got issues that you need to fix and b find all your happy clients and users and encourage them to leave you a review? Well, there's an idea coming up in our marketing minute that's going to help you to do just that. And you'll hear it in the next few minutes when I speak to MSPs who've been running their own business for five, 10 years or more and they're still doing all the sales in the business. You can understand that one of their goals is to get out of the. [00:10:56] Speaker C: Sales and hire someone else to do it for them. [00:10:59] Speaker B: The thing is, when you come to do this, you are going to make a series of very predictable mistakes. My special guest today is going to tell you what those mistakes are, how you can avoid them, and how you can hire the right first salesperson for your MSP who's going to make your life easier and generate you more revenue. [00:11:18] Speaker D: Hi, my name is Robert Gillette. I'm co founder of the MSP Growth os. I'm the head of content these days. [00:11:24] Speaker B: And it is so cool to have. [00:11:25] Speaker C: You back on the podcast. Robert, thank you so much for joining us again. You've been on the show before and that was under a different business name. You were MSP Dojo back then and I want to know so much about the MSP Growth os. We're going to talk about that. Towards the end of the interview, you. [00:11:39] Speaker B: And I were hanging out just a. [00:11:41] Speaker C: Couple of months ago at Scalecon 25 in New Orleans. Actually, we were on like a big. [00:11:46] Speaker B: Paddle boat thing, which was the VIP. [00:11:48] Speaker C: Night, and we were sat down batting, batting away the insects from the Mississippi river. And we were talking about MSPs hiring their first salesperson. And that's why we've got you back on the show today, because that's a massive, massive subject. [00:12:00] Speaker B: So before we talk about that and all the mistakes that MSPs make when. [00:12:04] Speaker C: They go and hire their first salesperson. [00:12:06] Speaker B: Let'S just first of all find out. [00:12:08] Speaker C: A little bit about you. So tell us, who is Robert Gillette? [00:12:12] Speaker D: Yeah, I'm a. I'm just a dumb sales guy, you know, who sold a bunch of. Bunch of revenue for an MSP and then decided that was too much work. And so I now coach MSPs and, you know, help them figure out how to get their own growth. Because sales is really hard for MSPs for very complex reasons. [00:12:29] Speaker C: Oh, it is. And that's. I think that's a recurring theme on this podcast, is we've been going well, we've just, we've just celebrated six years. And it's crazy how, how difficult MSPs find sales. They find it difficult doing their own sales. They find it difficult hiring other people to do their sales. [00:12:44] Speaker B: And that's what let's focus in on. [00:12:46] Speaker C: On that aspect, because I think the last time you were on and we'll find the episode number, that was where you were talking about doing your own sales. I believe in terms of hiring a. [00:12:54] Speaker B: Salesperson, what's the trigger that makes an. [00:12:57] Speaker C: MSP think, Right, it's time for me to go and find someone to do this. Is it because they're sick of doing it themselves, or is it because they think someone else is going to do a better job or ramp up the activity? Or is it all of those things? [00:13:10] Speaker D: I think it's all of those things, but probably the most common one is people, they just hate it. They don't want to do it. It's really hard. It's super discouraging. It's just incredibly difficult. The activity, the rejection that everything about it, almost the exact opposite of what a traditional IT professional might want to do with their life. And so people start this MSP and then it grows for a little bit and they get some referrals, and then that comes the point where they're like, we need more revenue. And then they got to go do sales and Pretty quickly they're like, I hate this. And so they oftentimes want to hire a salesperson just to abdicate the responsibility to someone else. And that shows up as hiring a salesperson or a marketing company or a cold calling company or someone. Or just like make this your problem and not mine and I'll give you money and that way if it doesn't work, I can blame you and try with someone else. And that's probably the most common reason why people outsource this function. [00:14:07] Speaker C: So I completely agree with you there. And actually I think what compounds that and makes it even more of a problem is first of all, when MSPs do hire a sales resource, they actually throw all of marketing and sales at it. So they're like, oh great salesperson. So you can create some audiences, you can do some content, you can generate some leads, you can warm those leads up, you can close those leads, you can account manage them, you can do all of these things. And the other compounding factor that also makes it difficult is the MSP who only does two sales meetings a month, takes on a full time person and has no other plan to increase the number of sales meetings. What are the mistakes do you see apart from those? [00:14:44] Speaker D: Oh yeah, that's. I mean first of all, two meetings a month would be a miracle for some MSPs I talked to. They're lucky if they get 10 a year. But I think the other big problem is that they don't give them any kind of a process or plan to follow. They hire these people that have been really successful in other industries in sales, hopefully. And then what happens is they step into this job and they're like, okay, well whose example am I following? And they can't really follow the owner because they've never been successful in that role. And so they oftentimes are just shooting in the dark at what may or may not work. And then again, when they're not successful, the the MSP owner has someone to blame that's not themselves. [00:15:20] Speaker C: Can I suggest something possibly controversial and you can agree or disagree? [00:15:24] Speaker B: Yeah, please. [00:15:25] Speaker C: You and I have spoken to enough MSPs who even though they don't do more than let's say 10 sales meetings a year, they will close six of those or seven of those. And so every, almost every MSP I've spoken to where the owner does the sales, they'll say to me, if I. [00:15:40] Speaker B: Can get in front of someone, I. [00:15:41] Speaker C: Close loads, I close, you know, three, 90 are big, four out of four, 90% better. And someone said to me a few Years ago. And it was on this podcast. I can't remember who it was, but it was. It was another sales expert. There are other sales experts out there, Robert, and they said to me, the reason that they have such a great close rate is because they're not doing enough sales meetings. So they're literally getting the most basic number of sales meetings, and they're only meeting with people who are ready to buy, whereas they should be doing 50, 60, 70 of those meetings and getting a 50% close rate. Would you agree with that? [00:16:15] Speaker D: Oh, absolutely. I think the snarky way I frame it is it's like telling me, oh, every time someone puts a fully cooked steak on my table, oh, I can eat it. I'm so good, I cut it up, eat it. Well, that's great. That's kind of congratulations. You didn't choke on it. That's kind of expected. The challenge is what happens when you need to go find people that don't even know they're ready to work with you yet. They haven't done all the hard work of identifying the problems, exploring different options, reaching out to their network to find providers that then somehow referred and got ended up right on your table. Uh, when you have to go do all that other work, that's what we're asking. Usually a salesperson to go do is identify companies and create some kind of urgency or need and then start the conversation, bring them right to your table so you can sign them. And that's just gonna be a lot harder than sitting around and waiting for someone else to do all that hard work, whether it be your prospect or a referral partner or a current client or something like that. [00:17:09] Speaker C: Yeah, I completely agree. So, all right. You and I have done a pretty effective job of just taking everyone down and making them feel terrible. So let's lift them back up. So, yeah, yeah, Sor. Sorry about that. What would you do? So, and obviously, this is what you do. This is you help msps do exactly this and to get their sales right. But what would you do? So you're an MSP owner, you're sick to death of sales, you don't do enough sales activity, and you're ready for someone else to do it. What would you recommend? [00:17:34] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. First you gotta make sure, like, can I afford to do this? This is a big one. Because most people hire a salesperson as, like, their option of last resort. They hire a salesperson and they go, God, I really hope this works out. Because if they don't, I'm out of money. And then what happens is the salesperson's performance is judged off of cash flow and not off of what's a reasonable expectation for their job. And so that's the first thing I figure out, like, can I even afford to do this? And then the second thing is, once I hire this person, how am I going to, for lack of a better term, make it good to work here? Like, there's an old quote that says, people don't quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers. And so one of the key distinctions is understanding. Once you hire your first salesperson, you've hired someone who's probably unlike you, anyone else at your msp. Your MSP was started by you as the first employee, and you have a culture. You have a love of technology and the way you think and act and the way you're motivated. And then because of that charismatic individual, you've gathered people like you under you. And so you all kind of feel and think and want to work the same way. And then you hire the salesperson who is, by their very definition, very different than you. They want different things, they think different ways, they need different tools, they need to be motivated differently. And so how are you as a manager? Because, congratulations, you're now also a sales manager. You don't just have a salesperson. How are you as a sales manager going to create the kind of culture where they're going to thrive and give them the kind of tools they need, including mentorship, to be good at this thing that you're barely good at yourself? So that's the next piece that's very difficult that I would. I would encourage people, if you can answer those two questions, how can you pay for it? And then how are you going to make it good? You're well on your way to success in this. In this area. [00:19:16] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I'm sure you and I would agree, because I'm recalling our conversation of a couple of months ago on the paddle steamer that the vast majority of MSPs, when faced with those two questions, go, oh, do you know what? You're right, let's not do this. I'm not going to do it. And they get, you know, as the owner, you get trapped in the business doing, continuing to do the thing you don't enjoy. But of course, the quality of that comes down. Anytime you're doing something that you've done for 10 years and you don't want to do anymore, you're not going to do a great job of it. [00:19:43] Speaker B: It. [00:19:44] Speaker C: So it's 2026, like a couple of Weeks away. And this is our last regular episode of the year. If, let's say that someone's listening to this over. Over Christmas, watching this on YouTube, and they're just going to hit January ready to go, it's like, right, I'm going to answer those questions, Robert. I'm gonna. I'm gonna do this. What are the steps? What are the steps that you would recommend to get started? [00:20:04] Speaker D: Yeah, at first is I wouldn't make that decision on your own. I'll find somebody who has done this before and has actual repeatable success in this area that can tell you whether or not you're right to the answer to those two questions. And this is so funny to me how many times, even myself, we, as a. Maybe this is a uniquely American problem, I don't know. But we all want to be the first to do a thing. We all just want to be the first guy to invent that product or that process or the thing. We want to be unique in some way. And I don't know why that is. I'm not going to try to ever figure that out in my life, probably, but that my encouragement would be. You're not the first person to approach this problem, and you're most certainly not the first person that will be successful at it. Find someone who's done the exact thing you want to do and then ask them if your plan is a good one. Because this is the other kind of weird truth about this. There isn't only one good way to grow your MSP when you're under 5 million. There's like three or five really great, successful, proven ways to grow your MSP to 5 million from maybe 5 to 10 or 20, 30, 50, 100. There's fewer ways, but there are still very plausible paths that have been run before by people that are successful that would be happy to share with you whether or not your plan is going to work based on their experience. So that'd be like, just don't make decisions on it. You don't have to reinvent this. Find somebody who can help you figure it out. [00:21:27] Speaker C: Yeah, I love this. And it's a really nice segue, actually, into what you do because obviously you've had a big transformation in your working life over the last year. So you were the MSP dojo, which was famously the only place where you could go to actually practice sales. And I still think it's an amazing concept. And you were the first to do that. You know, talking about someone who wonders why people are first, you were the first to do that both in the channel and I think, you know, in any, in any sector that I was aware of, certainly. But now you're obviously you've evolved that you've moved that on. [00:21:58] Speaker B: Tell us about MSP Growth os. So what is that and how do you help msps with these exact problems? [00:22:06] Speaker D: Yeah, so businesses that are kind of approaching that 5 million or above that 5 million, we help them figure out their particular revenue generation model. How do they want to grow to whatever business level they want. And this is really hard. There's this gap, this black hole around 6 or 8 million that'll just suck MSPs in and they just, that's where all their money goes and then they just fall back to five. And it's very hard to grow past that. There's also similar ones at around 18 and around 36. And so the challenge is that I now have partnered with a guy who actually taught me how to do this as a sales professional who organically grew his MSP from 1 to I think 143 million. We have coaches now on our team that have grown their MSP to 60 million and 163 million respectively. So we have people that can help MSP owners figure out their journey through the forest as they grow to whatever revenue they're really looking for. And we can help them set reasonable time frames and expectations and what they can expect at an organizational level as they try and build that new revenue engine. That's all we focus on. It's just new revenue. If you got service delivery problems, you go talk to somebody else. But this is really, we're just trying to help them figure out how to get the new client revenue and spin up an engine to provide that kind of growth they're looking for. We do that through recruiting, peer groups, training, and then one on one coaching. So just trying to everything that we would need to help them find the right people to help them grow their business and then kind of, I don't want to say manage them because we don't always do that. But it's mostly coaching and then some kind of accountability groups and knowledge base and all that kind of stuff. So I don't know if that's. That makes sense. [00:23:40] Speaker C: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I have to say with those kind of big numbers of the coaches that you work with, the size of the MSPs that they grew to, you shouldn't have called it MSP Growth os. You should have called it the MSP Overachievers Club. [00:23:52] Speaker D: Yeah, maybe. Well, you know, it's A little longer of a URL, but that's fine. [00:23:59] Speaker C: That's true. That's true. Yeah. Stick with MSP Growth os. Robert, thank you so much for being on the show. Let's get you back on again next year. Let's not leave it till you and I are sat at Scalecon 2016, which is inevitably bound to happen. We're bound to sit at some VIP event and sit and have a similar conversation. [00:24:15] Speaker B: But for now, just tell us how can we get in touch with you? [00:24:18] Speaker C: So what is that website address and how do we find you on LinkedIn? [00:24:22] Speaker D: First of all, thank you for having me. It's an honor. Mspgrowthos.com or you can look me up on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to respond to you there, but either way, I'd love to talk to you even if you're not at those sizes. We love helping MSPs hit the revenue growth growth that they're looking for because for us, it's the one thing we know how to do and we just love helping people with that. So thank you so much. [00:24:43] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast, the Marketing Minute. [00:24:47] Speaker E: Hi, this is Michelle from the Tech Leader Network, and I've been racking my brains on how Service Desk can contribute to your marketing efforts. Here's what I came up with. Make sure that your positive and negative feedback survey results has some form of commentary. The negative, you can obviously take that away and do something about it, but the positive, have those feed into a wall of love on the website or something like that. [00:25:12] Speaker A: Coming up, coming up next week. [00:25:13] Speaker B: Thanks for listening. This week, that was actually our last regular episode for this year because we've got four special episodes coming up to take us through Christmas and into the new year starting next week when I've asked a number of channel marketing and growth experts to tell me their predictions for Ms. In 2026. We're going to see what those predictions are in next week's show. [00:25:34] Speaker A: See you then for MSPs around the world. Around the World, the MSP Marketing Podcast with Paul Green.

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